1. Field
The present disclosure relates to annotation of electronic documents. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to a method for collaboratively tagging and highlighting electronic documents.
2. Related Art
Web-based services are widely available on the Internet today. Many web-based services allow social tagging of documents, such as Yahoo's MyWeb and del.icio.us. With such services, a user can tag documents (such as web pages) of interest for sharing or later reference by bookmarking the document and attaching a set of freely chosen tags (or keywords) to it. Also, a user may elect to share his bookmarks or tags with other users. These tags may subsequently be searched and browsed by the other users. In addition to tagging, a user can also annotate the content of a web page. For example, a user may choose to highlight part of a web page, or insert a comment. Similarly to the sharing of bookmarks with other users, a user can share his annotated web documents with other users, such as users on his friends list or other general users.
When sharing his tagging and annotation of certain documents, or viewing other people's tagging and annotations, a user often would like to control the scope of his searching or browsing space. Most existing social tagging services allow a user to identify a list of friends with whom he can share tagging and annotation. However, this manual friends-list creation process can be tedious and burdensome, especially when a user wishes view annotations in the same interest area by users not on his friends list and also allow such users to view different annotated documents.